Parental rights: The new wedge issue

If there were a recipe for creating a new conservative culture-wars issue, it might look something like this: Start with the United Nations, fold in the prospect of an expanded role for government in children’s lives, add some unfortunate court decisions, then toss in Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton.

And indeed, when House Republicans recently found themselves with all these ingredients at hand, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) started pre-heating the oven.

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Hoekstra last week introduced a bill in the House to amend the U.S. Constitution to permanently “enshrine” in American society an inviolable set of parents’ rights. The bill had 70 co-sponsors, all Republicans, including Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Minority Leader John A. Boehner.

The bill, said Hoekstra, is intended to stem the “slow erosion” of parents’ rights and to circumvent the effects of a United Nations treaty he believes “clearly undermines parental rights in the United States.”

The treaty to which he refers is the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a 20-year-old document signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 but never ratified. The treaty sets international standards for government obligations to children in areas that range from protection from abuse and exploitation to ensuring a child’s right to free expression.

While a treaty that seeks to protect children may sound innocuous, its opponents, such as Michael Farris, the Christian conservative founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, see in it a dystopian future in which “Parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children”; “A child’s ‘right to be heard’ would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed”; and “Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion,” as he puts it on his website parentalrights.org.

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The Convention on the Rights of the Child emerged from relative obscurity most recently when, during the presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama replied to a question about the treaty by saying he found it “embarrassing” that the United States stood with Somalia – the only other U.N. member that has not ratified the treaty — and promised to review it as president, and then again in the confirmation hearing for Ambassador Susan Rice, when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) pressed the then-nominee on the treaty’s status.

“[H]ow can we be proud of our country when we haven't ratified?” Boxer asked. “In this case, the only other country, as I understand it, that hasn't ratified is Somalia. OK — excuse me. This is America. We're standing with Somalia. What is happening? What has happened?”

Rice replied that it was a “shame” that the United States is “keeping company” with Somalia, adding that “there can be no doubt that the president-elect and Secretary Clinton and I share a commitment to the objectives of this treaty and will take it up as an early question.”

That was enough to raise the hackles of parents’ rights advocates and sympathetic legislators, but it was far from a promise that the treaty would be sent to the Senate, or that it would ultimately be ratified; Rice also told Boxer that it was a “complicated treaty,” and that the State Department would need to take a close look at how to “manage the challenges of domestic implementation.”

She wasn’t kidding.

By its nature, the treaty combines two “third-rail” issues for conservatives — the implications of international treaties for U.S. sovereignty, and the role of the United Nations in U.S. affairs. “Opposing the U.N has been a rallying cry of the right for decades,” notes Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.